Bruce Eckel gave a talk on June 25, 2004 at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.
Bruce says:
I gave a presentation for the California Digital Library on issues and directions for the Java language. In it I look at where the language has come from, where it is going, and new features in JDK 1.5/J2SE 5.0. I also have comparisons with other languages and note things that I have learned from other languages. The presentation is 2 hours 16 minutes long.
Be warned, those of you who feel Java is the best language, forever and without bounds, and that it has no limitations: herein I critize Java, but in the spirit of understanding the limitations of the language. I strongly believe that understanding these limits makes you a more effective programmer.
Bruce Eckel Talk: Java Issues & Directions
Bruce talks about how Sun puts it mark on Java (e.g. marketing gets in the way). He compares Matz (Ruby creator), and how he gave a talk called “Ruby Sucks”. This could never come out of the Sun marketing machine.
AWT sucked…. Sun tried to fix and then Swing is great.
Threading was broken…. and only now in J2SE 5.0 are we ok (Thanks to Doug Lea)
etc etc etc.
Bruce also had an interesting point about how “Java has too many words”. He countered the argument that IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse write those words for you. Since someone has to read these, and maintain them, they still need to grok everything.
He also took a jab at TheServerSide, and how the community talks about the ideas that he has :)
